US: Undocumented immigrants in the United States have been heartened by last week's Democratic election victory but reviving comprehensive reform legislation could take months, and its passage through the new Congress is not guaranteed.
President George Bush last week identified immigration reform as one of the issues on which he could co-operate with the Democratic leadership in Congress.
The president's approach to immigration finds more support among Democrats than Republicans.
Immigration reform is not part of the Democrats' agenda for the first 100 legislative hours, however, which includes increasing the minimum wage, cutting interest rates on student loans and implementing the recommendations of the commission that investigated the September 11th attacks.
A spokesman for incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week that "under a Democratic process, there will be a more deliberative body and members will know what they are voting on". This means that, instead of simply rewriting immigration bills from the outgoing Congress and moving them quickly to a vote, the Democrats will start the entire legislative process again, with fresh hearings and lengthy committee drafting sessions, known as mark-ups.
Earlier this year, the senate approved a bill that would improve border security and enforcement of immigration laws but would introduce a temporary guest-worker programme.
Most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the US would have been allowed to regularise their status and eventually apply for citizenship.
The House of Representatives had already passed a bill which focused solely on enforcement, which would have made illegal immigration a felony and would criminalise anyone who assisted an illegal alien.
Instead of negotiating a compromise bill with the senate, the Republican House leadership held a series of "field hearings" around the US, an exercise many Democrats viewed as little more than electioneering.
Battling against popular anger over the Iraq War and Mr Bush's unpopularity, some Republicans saw immigration as a promising wedge issue in last week's election and campaigned on a stridently anti-immigration platform.
It was a gamble that backfired badly and some of the most prominent Republican opponents of immigration - including John Hostettler, chairman of the House judiciary subcommittee on immigration - lost their seats.
In Arizona, which receives more illegal immigrants than California, Texas, and New Mexico combined - and has seen its crime rate soar in recent years - anti-immigration candidates Randy Graf and JD Hayworth lost to Democrats who back a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Arizona's governor Janet Napolitano easily beat off a challenge from a Republican who put a hard-line approach to immigration at the centre of his campaign.
Any new legislation is likely to start in the senate, where there is a majority in favour of comprehensive immigration reform, despite the election of populist Democrats such as Ohio's Sherrod Brown.
Three dozen Democrats supported the hard-line Republican immigration bill in the House of Representatives last year and some of the new Democratic congressmen favour a tough approach.
The AFL-CIO trade union, which helped to fund many Democratic candidates, has criticised the guest-worker plan as a form of indentured servitude, although the union supports the concept of a path to citizenship.
If the Democrats are serious about immigration reform, they will have to move by the summer of 2007 or the presidential election the following year could stand in the way. For campaigners such as the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, which represents the undocumented Irish in the US, the coming months will be crucial.